The Timucua Language

Timucua is an extinct isolate, once spoken primarily in Florida. Its relationship to other language families has not been clearly demonstrated.

Our knowledge of Timucua comes almost entirely from 17th century Spanish colonial documents. The most important of these fall into two categories: a.) a Latinate grammar (Pareja 1614) (hereafter the Arte), giving a treatment of some aspects of Timucua grammar and b.) several long volumes of parallel Spanish-Timucua religious materials, including a confessional , three catechisms, and a doctrina (explication of Christian doctrine).

The original documents upon which this dictionary are based are Pareja (1612a, 1612b, 1613, 1614, 1627a, 1627b), Movilla (1635a, 1635b).

There are explorations of a few areas of Timucua grammar in Gatschet (1877, 1878, 1880) and in Adams and Vinson (1886). The only modern account of Timucua grammar is Granberry (1993), but there are large gaps in his account of the language.

See Broadwell (2014), Dubcovsky and Broadwell (to appear), and Broadwell (to appear) for more discussion of the Timucua language.

Broadwell, George Aaron. to appear. Shadow authors: The texts of the earliest Florida authors. Franciscans and American Indians in Pan-Borderlands Perspective: Adaptation, Negotiation, and Resistance. American Academy of Franciscan History.

Dubcovsky, Alejandra and George Aaron Broadwell. to appear. Writing Timucua: Recovering and Interrogating Indigenous Authorship. Early American Studies.